https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpg00Doug!https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpgDoug!2014-06-12 11:54:402014-06-12 11:55:07Don't pull that thing out unless you plan to bang

And our intelligence industry was apparently completely caught off guard by these developments in Iraq. How much are we spending on the CIA/NSA spy complex these days? (Oh that’s right, we’re not allowed to know). We could save a lot of money and have no different results if we just shut the whole thing down.

@Gypsy Howell: When those you might want to monitor know that their electronic communications can be monitored, they will resort, the bastards, to old fashioned human means of communication that are not so easily monitored. Also, too, HUMINT is hard and takes time to set up, and involves a lot of skills that really don’t translate well into the private sector where the money is, and we’re fresh out of Ivy League legacy types who want to play James Bond.

Usually, outnumbering an opposing force by 40-1 is a slam dunk cakewalk.

That assumes the Iraqi military viewed them as an opposing force. With the tribal dynamics in places like Iraq, that’s far from a given.

That all said, 800 troops is probably on the scale of what one of our cattle ranchers can call up in times of tyranny. Anyone think that 800 troops can hold half of the country, or do you think the Iraqi military can find a way to pull their pants back up and restore order? Shouldn’t be too hard to take back, I wouldn’t think.

That must be the most irritatingly smug, and wrongest, rock song I’ve ever heard. And I never thought I would ever find myself describing a rock song as irritatingly smug.

As for the sitch in Mosul — well, Iraq was never America’s to govern. Or to fight for. That Iraq has an expensive, lily-livered joke of an army happened despite a great deal of American blood, sweat and treasure. Had GIs been there to drive ISIS out of Mosul, they would have had to hand it over to Iraq at some point, and then ISIS would just come back. It might be a painful outcome for America, but George Walker Bush fucked it up back in ’03 by invading Iraq in the first place.

@🌷 Martin: Well, given the tribal dynamics, it might well be impossible for the central government, under its currently Shiite mind set, to take back Mosul. Because allegiance to “Iraq” is rapidly becoming non-existent. Botsplainer pointed out that the Versailles solution was not much of a solution.

This whole thing is a glorious mess that the United States created by obeying the stupid orders of the Dark Lord in the first place.

It would seem that “normal” Muslims are really scared of “bat shit crazy” Muslims. Let the whole middle east annihilate each other for one tribal reason or another while we supply “slightly used” weaponry. Only dropped once.

It might be a painful outcome for America, but George Walker Bush fucked it up back in ’03 by invading Iraq in the first place.

The reason it’s painful is that a whole lot of people are completely unable to admit they are wrong, or as their second favorite book describes, unable to remove the plank from their eye. (Their first favorite book having something to do with trains.)

Oh FSM this gets worse and worse. Shadow President McCain wants Obama to fire his national security team and the Joint Chiefs. He wants to bring back Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus to ‘save Iraq’. What the heck these guys have some kind of green lantern woopie stick that they can just wave over the sand and make it all better.

After 40 + years of sticking our nose in other peoples business we still haven’t figure out if they won’t fight for their own country than American soldiers can not save the situation

@🌷 Martin: Reading that Vox article, looks like ISIS has expanded about as far as it can and threats of taking Baghdad are empty. Can’t imagine that Iran will let Maliki fall and will do at least as much for him as they did for Assad. This may be a new equilibrium for that region, because ISIS can’t take Syria, either, and will get their clocks cleaned if they head into Kurdish regions. This is probably roughly what would have happened if we had not toppled Saddam and tried to maintain the fiction of a unified Iraq, i.e., Saddam would have eventually fallen and the country split along sectarian lines. The US wasted thousands of lives and trillions of dollars trying to plow the sea, and now the usual morons will try to blame Obama for not using a bigger plow.

I’ll do you one better. Herbert Walker Bush said exactly this would happen in his 1990s autobigraphy explainingg why he did not continue into Iraq from Kuwait to overthrow Saddam. So much of this whole mess comes from daddy issues.

Let the whole middle east annihilate each other for one tribal reason or another while we supply “slightly used” weaponry.

Sigh. Just yesterday I was telling Glenn Greenwald I didn’t see a lot of anti-Muslim bigotry around here. Making glib “Just let’em kill each other off” remarks is a bit more dismissive of Muslim lives than is entirely consistent with not being anti-Muslim.

One idiot doesn’t make a bigotry – and Greenwald’s hyperbolic nonsense about this being one of the worst anti-Muslim comment sections in the world was a pathetic attempt to deflect criticism of his own distinctly limited fight for and understanding of “liberty”.

This sounds unpossible to me. Iran is the single greatest threat to our continued existence. This is fact and unassailable. But somehow the little 10+ year dustup between Iran and Iraq happened, and scariest brown people army in the world could not manage to wipe out the cowardly Iraqi army.
So, does that make ISIS more powerful than Iran?!
McCain! Graham! Cheney! Fire up the van! We’re getting the band back together!!

@Morzer: I dare say if this were a situation where the prevailing religion were Christianity, and that it was Catholics vs. Protestants, the same attitude would be given…let them fight it out using our slightly used weapons. I suppose Greenwald ALSO thinks this site is anti-Semitic because the commenter said “the entire Middle East” which tosses Israel into the mix.

War weariness does not equal “anti-Muslim”, and I think that’s what is being expressed here.

They will endlessly try to smear Obama in a “who lost Iraq” campaign, and they will get nowhere except with the 27%. Everyone other than the 27% wanted us of out of there pronto and understands that it’s a no-win situation.

@SatanicPanic: They’re not “chickens” necessarily if you understand their motivation. They didn’t join the army out of a profound sense of duty and patriotism or so they could show everybody their war faces. The vast majority simply saw it as a chance to have a steady paycheck. In a country where military service was once reserved for groups favored by the regime (i.e. Sunnis from places loyal to Saddam), there’s really no tradition of serving in a standing army and adhering to its discipline, no real sense of a country to defend beyond the horizons of your family and clan, and thus little determination to face down crazy jihadis when the payoff isn’t immediately clear. I would also submit that the Iraqi military’s estimation of there being 30,000 boots on the ground there should be taken with an enormous grain of salt. They’ve been papering over enormous desertion rates for months now. Of course, there’s also this.

@Roger Moore: “Lost” is a funny word. I’ll bet a cold beverage you can’t open your closet or dresser without finding a “Made in Vietnam” label. And Vietnam more or less loves America. I have a great picture from downtown Hanoi, with a socialist-realist “4.30.75” banner hanging from a lamppost, and a Chevy Blazer parked at the curb underneath.

Fortunately, there’s a man with a plan to get this Islamicist jihadi shit sorted out:

Don’t need all that fooforaw. President McCain had this nailed down a couple years ago. Just get them Shawls and them Sununus into a room, look ’em in the eye and tell ’em, “Cut out all the bullshit!”
Boom. Done.

Has anyone else considered that we’re getting it wrong and that we have been for a long time? Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, how are they any better off than they would have been without the intervention of the world’s most expensive military machine?

So what does ISIS have against the Turks such that they killed their diplomats? Pissed that the leaders of Iran and Turkey were talking with each other the other day? Trying to get Turkey to change sides in the civil war in Syria?

Has anyone else considered that we’re getting it wrong and that we have been for a long time? Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, how are they any better off than they would have been without the intervention of the world’s most expensive military machine?

I’m beginning to understand Iran’s wanting to have nuclear weapons. Might be the only “deterrent” to this sort of thing.

And I saw this ending up a second Viet Nam long before we even invaded.

Interesting story in the NYT yesterday about how Maliki asked the WH to bomb the staging areas for these radicals, and the WH refused. Seems after Maliki refused to have an American force left in the country, the WH decided he was on his own.

The real tragedy is the hundreds of thousand of refugees who are now on the move.

@EconWatcher: Actually, give recent history, the 27% wanted us out also until Obama got us out. Now that want to be back into Iraq. I keep saying Obama should come out in favor of breathing. The 27% would hold their breath until the turned blue and died. Then maybe we go back to acting like a grown up country.

@skerry: Apparently their “claim” includes Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and probably Israel as well. The original group was founded by a fighter from Afghanistan interested in overthrowing the Jordanian monarchy.

I for one do not want to send my sons to Iraq to save a country that the Iraqis themselves don’t feel is worth saving. If there are Republicans in this country who feel differently, they are welcome to send their children over there to die in that bottomless pit of despair.

Because of Iraq’s location, the blowback from Bush’s criminal invasion of the country will be far worse for America’s long-term strategic interests than the Pol Pot regime (though hopefully not quite as awful for the civilian population). This was all entirely predictable, even inevitable, and the people who promoted the illegal invasion in the first place are the ones who must be held accountable. The rest of the world knows who to blame, we remain stupid at our own peril.

The common thing between those three cases at that they were all basically civil wars. Whenever America had a success intervening it was because there was a foreign power that had invaded (WW’s I&II of course, but even Kuwait ’91 falls into that category). But Americans just want to fight the favorite imperial/fascist/communist/islamist boogieman of the day, without considering what is actually going on.

@Gin & Tonic:
You should know better than that. “Losing” Vietnam isn’t about whether they’re friendly to us or not. It’s primarily about blaming the DFHs for the warmongers’ mistakes and secondarily about Vietnam being its own, independent country that’s friendly to us by choice rather than a lickspittle colony with a government that rubberstamps whatever we tell them to do. If Iraq somehow gets its shit together and decides to be friendly to us, Obama will still get the blame for “losing” the place for exactly the same reason.

@Calouste: Yes. And they repeatedly want to choose someone to win, which means we suck at being able to bring peace anywhere. We could, of course, arbitrate disputes. But what we end up doing is offering to be the arbitrator while at the same time clearly favoring one side over the other.

McCain said that the U.S. should consider providing air power in Iraq, as the Iraqi government has reportedly requested, but he ruled out putting U.S. troops on the ground there.

“No, I don’t think we should send troops back there,” he said. “We should explore all the options in air power, get a team over there to advise them. It’s so serious I’m not sure exactly how it can be done. Al Qaeda is now the richest terrorist organization in history.”But McCain said that he believed “airstrikes alone will not be enough.”

Interesting story in the NYT yesterday about how Maliki asked the WH to bomb the staging areas for these radicals, and the WH refused. Seems after Maliki refused to have an American force left in the country, the WH decided he was on his own.

MSNBC reporting Maliki is still asking the US to bomb the bad guys. Whoever that may be.

@Linda Featheringill: IIRC, al-Maliki refused to let the US keep even a team of “military advisors” in place: everyone had to go, no exceptions, because that’s what his administration insisted had to happen. It’s a bit late for him to ask for assistance now. But it’s well past time the US, instead of giving in and bombing the ISIS camps, asked al-Maliki what he has in mind – if only to encourage the army to stand its ground (I take it arms, armor, training and the assumption of something resembling patriotism aren’t enough).

Of course the GOTea chickenhawks will complain if the US doesn’t “provide material assistance” because Teh Terrrrrrism™, and will complain if the US does because it’s another foreign misadventure. There is no action POTUS could take that will make them happy. It’d be predictably remarkable if, should the US reengage there, they start referring to the whole fiasco as “Obama’s Iraq.”

@raven: lets se how this works out.
1. air strikes won’t be enough. check
2. pilot shot down and captured. check
3. troops to mount a recuse mission and additional troops to protect the rescue mission. check
4. troops attacked so need more troops for force protection. check
5. finally figure out how to get out. check
6. oops a man left behind and that the moosalim Obama is abandoning him. check
7. Obama gets the guy back with some kind of trade. check
8. Obama is a traitor must impeach for doing just what the GOP has been demanding check.

Republicans blaming Obama for this catastrophe is a bridge too far even for our press that loves regurgitating Republican talking points. For that reason Obama will not risk putting any of his “fingerprints” on this disaster by trying to help the Iraqi government.

Erase the Franco-British boundaries that came in after the defeat of the Ottomans, and that part of the world gets a lot more sane.

Um, maybe. I wouldn’t assume that you can draw neat ethnic and denominational lines instead of Sykes-Picot in an area that’s always been a jumble of allegiances and identity. Not without substantial movement or elimination of populations.

“Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard” is still the motto in Aleppo.

Sistani also expressed condolences for the Iraqi troops killed by ISIS fighters and pledged the religious authority’s support to the Iraqi army in this struggle. It is more or less a declaration of Shiite jihad on ISIS

Since to a Shitte at this point there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between ISIS and the average Sunni just trying to survive.

Satan is going to have to open a few new levels of hell for Bush and the rest of the war criminals in his administration, as well as a few chosen ones in Congress

Wasn’t it more the predecessors of the Nothern Alliance that we backed against the Soviets, rather than OBL’s jihadis? Believe me, I’m not defending the policy, just clarifying a detail.

The various warlords and militants put aside their differences to fight the USSR. Once the Red Army left, those groups splintered, and the precursor to the ‘Northern Alliance’ asserted its authority over Kabul; the Pashtun mujahedin retreated, regrouped under the name ‘Taliban’, and eventually took over.

WSJ is reporting that Iran is deploying troops to fight the ISIS. That’s almost too good to be true. Just think what McCain, Graham and Bibi will say about that. Do we bomb Iran or give them weapons. Decisions decisions

@pat: I don’t think they’ve refused, per se. I would right now anyway. Eventually, we probably are going to have to work with Iraq.

No government in the surrounding area has an interest in setting up a revolutionary Sunni state in Iraq. However, right now, Iraq does not seem to have much of a plan on how it is going to take back that territory even if we are providing air support. Until there is a plan, I don’t see any reason why the administration should be involved.

@D58826: Well, ISIS is Sunni. Iran is Shiite. The maths here are not difficult at all.

This was always a problem with the entire aftermath of the utterly illegal invasion of Iraq. Inside Iraq, we supported the Shiites, because Saddam was a Sunni strongman, and Saddam was the bad guy. Outside of Iraq, the Shiites of Iran were our existential enemies. The contradiction inherent in our policy escaped the pea brains of the neocons. Or perhaps could not fit inside them at the same time.

@Corner Stone: Ummmm. Not so much. I suppose ISIS would make them happier than a Muslim Brotherhood run country, but no, the House of Saud would be very short sighted to create a government on its border that has as its its goal the overthrow of itself for a more spiritually pure form of government.

@Linda Featheringill: @CONGRATULATIONS!: Well, we broke it. Like it or not, we have an obligation to the innocents placed in peril. Some of us still have friends over there who joined the Army after the jobs as interpreters dried up.

I think the best policy is to keep our hands off either way. The very most we should do is to share some intel with the Iraqis, knowing full well that it will get passed along to the Iranians if they’re helping out. We should certainly not give any kind of material support that will be used against us when we’re the ones in their sights.

@Cassidy: Your right but I’m afraid that ship may have sailed. Something should have been done as our involvement was winding down to help these folks get out, either to the US or another Middle eastern country. We didn’t do it. But we have a history of that. Just ask the Vietnamese we left behind, some of them literally our children. Some one once said the only thing worse than being America’s enemy is being America’s friend

@D58826: I get that people don’t want to be involved. Saying it’s not our problem, though, is not true. It most definitely is out problem. We created it. The question is whether we take responsibility for it.

the House of Saud would be very short sighted to create a government on its border that has as its its goal the overthrow of itself for a more spiritually pure form of government.

It’s just a SWAG on my part, but I suspect Saudi wouldn’t mind a very religious Sunni force chafing against Iran and distracting them from other pursuits. Saudi knows, just as surely as they live and breathe, that the USG will never allow ISIS to sufficiently threaten the SA rulers.

I knew Abd al-Aziz al-Douri quite well when he was head of armed forces intelligence before he was VP. A very capable soldier, he had been CG of the Nebuchadnezzar Division of the RG. If he and some of his pals are running this campaign Maliki is screwed. What a great decision Bremer and the neocons made in disbanding the Army!! pl !!

@D58826: What would “take responsibility for it” even look like? Because if it involves “US combat forces going back in,” it’s a non-starter. The American people are done, finished, through with Iraq. Is that fair or just to the folks in Iraq who helped us and are now in the lurch? No. But it’s realistic.

No, we did not create it, or at least we only played a small, recent role in creating it. The Sunnis and Shia have been at each others’ throats for far longer than the United States has existed. We contributed to the current problem by removing Saddam Hussein from the equation, but we spend quite a lot of time and effort trying to set up a working government to replace him. I don’t think we owe some kind of infinite debt that demands we continue to intervene forever after any time the people living in Iraq resort to violence to settle their problems. As long as Iraq is an independent country, the people living there have primary responsibility for what happens there.

@Corner Stone: I read an odd hypothesis that ISIS in Iraq might be recieving support from Iran. Doesn’t make much sense except that merging the Iraqi and Syrian groups together and getting them to focus on Iraq draws them out of Syria and allows the Iranians and Syrians to be viewed as defenders against extremism. Unplausible? Certainly. Unconceivable? Well, it is all that spycraft business so who knows?

“Iraqi officials told the Guardian that two divisions of Iraqi soldiers – roughly 30,000 men – simply turned and ran..”.

I’m tempted to ask where is John Wayne when you really need him? but recall that he was alive when the South Vietnamese army also turned and ran.

It will be very interesting to see if the inevitable “Obama lost Iraq” attacks will prompt any truth telling by democrats about the treason committed by the Bush/Cheney administration in 2002-2003. Better late than never, I suppose, if it happens at all.

@stickler: That’s why I said the ship had already sailed. Taking responsibility would have involved, to use an analogy, the same type of action that we took with the Hungarian refugees in 1956. Set up a process whereby those Iraqi’s who had cast their lot with the US would be gotten out of the country, along with their extended families if need be. I remember when they set up a refugee camp at Fort Dix in 1956. Same idea. It’s to late to do that now and your right no boots on the ground

@Corner Stone: Merging the Syrian and Iraqi components and moving the action into Iraq may take pressure off of Assad who is still struggling to take back the territory from them.

It might make sense to read the entire statement from Al-Quaeda as to why they were distancing themselves from this group. I haven’t found the entire statement. The press just jumped to “This Group is Too Extreme even for Al-Qaeda!!!!!” But it didn’t exactly say why that was.

I would argue that we had a pretty big role in creating the recent problem.

I think the fundamental problem is that there are people there who hate each other and want to kill each other. We upset the local balance and let the forces of violence and hate get loose, but the primary blame has to go on the people who are out there trying to kill their neighbors.

Kurds just “took” Tikrit. No surprise there. By “took”, I mean they drove in and parked their tanks and troops there….the Iraqi army had already left. Better it be in the hands of the peshmerga than the army – the Kurd would utterly destroy ISIL.

@chopper: Absent any evident way we could *improve* or stabilize the situation, I’d much prefer he not re-commit any US force to this situation.
So if Obama does authorize air strikes, I believe I will comment that I wished he did not.
Our recent interventions leave quite a lot to be desired in effective outcomes. I’d not like to see an extension in our stomping grounds.

What outcome do you think sounds acceptable, that’s within the bounds of capabilities?

@Mustang Bobby: I doubt it as the Sadrists have the will and means to hold most of baghdad against any non us corps sized attack. ISIS as long as they do not piss off elite Sunni opinion can take most of the upper euphrates and Tigris valleys as the Iraqi Army will not die and the Sunni militias are ok enough with isis but the shiite miltias that were willing to go head to head against heavy us an uk forces will fight for their homes

@Corner Stone: I don’t think you’ll have to worry about writing that anti-US airstrike piece now. I think our position moved from “hey, al-Malaki, perhaps you shouldn’t have treated those Sunnis so poorly. Maybe they wouldn’t be revolting” to “We cannot be seen to be providing air support to the Iranian special forces.”

@Morbo: Yes, I found this a few minutes ago:
“Three planes carrying American diplomats and contractors stationed at a training mission at an Iraqi airbase in Balad, north of Baghdad, flew out amid fears that the base could be surrounded by the militants. Germany ordered all its citizens to leave the Iraqi capital, as did Turkey, which has already had 80 people kidnapped by the militants, including the consul to the northern city of Mosul.”

“As Washington said it could provide military help – probably restricted to air strikes – reports emerged that Tehran had sent two battalions of Revolutionary Guards – the equivalent of Britain’s SAS – to assist the fellow Shia Muslim regime in Baghdad. By putting troops directly into the conflict, Iran will strengthen its foothold in the country, where it has long vied for influence with the West. “

@richard mayhew: I think Daniel Larison has summed up the situation quite well.

“…This is the trouble with trying to condition future aid on improvements in Maliki’s behavior: when push comes to shove, the U.S. usually refuses to cut off aid because it doesn’t want to “abandon” its client. We trick ourselves into thinking that propping up the client is extremely important to us, which is somehow supposed to justify his abuses and our endless enabling of them. The client knows this and continues to behave however he pleases. Lynch points out that Maliki will probably agree to all sorts of concessions now in order to acquire the aid he seeks, but will forget all about this once the immediate crisis is over:

It will be virtually impossible to force any meaningful political moves in the midst of an urgent crisis, and any promises made now will quickly be forgotten once the crisis has passed.

The Iraqi military has failed to resist ISIS because so many of the soldiers in it have no desire to fight for Maliki’s government, and that is at least partly a product of the abusive nature of his rule. The U.S. wasn’t able to change any of that when our forces were occupying the country, and it won’t be able to change it now. Sending more military equipment to a government that evidently cannot keep the equipment it already has from falling into the hands of its enemies is folly. That incidentally reminds us that sending arms to one approved group in a war zone doesn’t guarantee that those weapons won’t fall into the wrong hands. Sending more weapons into Syria could end up unwittingly aiding ISIS or similar groups. If the Iraqi army can’t keep control of the equipment and weapons the U.S. provided, why would we want to risk the same outcome with the “moderate” rebels in Syria?

Intervening militarily to prevent further advances by ISIS would commit the U.S. to acting as Maliki’s protector indefinitely, and the more resources that the U.S. commits to this the harder it will be to pull the plug at some point in the future. It would also put us in the extremely awkward and politically untenable position of fighting on the same side as the Iranian forces that have already been deployed to aid Maliki. Having spent years decrying the expansion of Iranian influence in the region (which was aided by the original invasion and overthrow of Hussein), why would interventionists think that we ought to start fighting on the Iranians’ side in Iraq?

It’s true that the U.S. is responsible for wrecking Iraq, and without the invasion and occupation none of this would now be happening. However, it should also be obvious that the U.S. cannot “fix” or even significantly ameliorate the political problems in Iraq through military aid or the use of force. It is imperative that we remember that when we hear the inevitable demands for “action.”

I wish someone would ask Senators Chicken Little Huckleberry and Senator Auger in McCain what they will do when air strikes fail? And except where there are ground troops who are willing to fight (see Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia and the Kurds in the North) it will certainly fail. If I have to play the game of imperial politics and war, and want to keep U.S. involvement to a minimum I would encourage Kurdistan to declare independence, and then set up drone bases and Special Forces operations to their to open up one front on the ISIS and then do an under the table deal with Iran and Assad to take care of do the second front. It will mean endless war for the poor SOBs, but at least the Democrats would not be having to respond to “Who Lost Iraq” for the next 30 years.

The Iraqi army outnumbered ISIS by about 40:1 in Mosul. Yet the army still turned tail and ran — ran so fast, in fact, as to leave some of their tanks and helicopters behind.

Sure proof that the Iraqi army was trained by the U.S. military.

The American military is a mob of felons and gang members and rapists led by incompetent careerists. Americans are cowardly bullies, and this is exactly what you would expect when the United States of America fields a fighting force. When a bully finds himself facing someone who actually stands up and fights back, the bully shits his pants and runs.

As a nation of sadistic inept bullies, America can prevail militarily only by relyiing on much stronger fighting forces (the Soviet Union in WW II) or by using terror weapons from a distance (nuclear bombing of Japan). When cowardly incompetent American soldiers come face-to-face with determined opponents who are willing to fight, the Americans always throw down their rifles and flee, as at Chosin Reservoir in North Korea in 1950.

As Tom Englehardt has pointed out in his latest article, America has amassed a record of unparalleled failure in its military flops since WW II.

The United States has been at war — major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions — nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began. That’s more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions.

Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face. They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again.

So here are five straightforward lessons — none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country — that could be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare:

1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn’t work. Ever.

2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn’t solve them. Never.

3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to “stabilize” or “protect” or “liberate” countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force.

4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its “warriors,” the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars.

5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in history,” the evidence is in: it isn’t.

@Gypsy Howell: Maybe if we didn’t have some arsehat announcing how we spy on them, who we spy on over there and what our tech tools are-we might actually have known something. God, I wonder if there was some sort of massive issue that has caused disruption in our overseas spying operations?

Maybe if we didn’t have some arsehat announcing how we spy on them, who we spy on over there and what our tech tools are-we might actually have known something.

Beautiful! Blame the victim!

America’s self-hating bully-worshiping pathology never fails to surface, like a turd in a cesspool.

Yes, America’s vaunted intelligence community is sooooooooooo magnificent at detecting threats before they happen…like the Cuban Missile Crisis–whoops! The CIA didn’t have a fucking clue! Or the overthrow of the Shah in Iran–whoops! Once again, the CIA didn’t have a goddamn clue! Or the collapse of the Soviet Union–whoops! Again, the CIA didn’t have an inkling what was gonna happen! Or the 9/11 attacks–whoops! And yet again, the CIA was as hopeless and helpless as a brain-damaged trilobite!

The CIA could be replaced by a baboon tossing darts at a board with imaginary threats on it, and the baboon would do a better job. So the natural and obvious conclusion to your typical deluded authoritarian bully-worshing halfwit Americano like Ruemara is…America needs more totalitarian Orwellian spying on its own population!!!

Since Corner Stone and I and a handful of others have been predicting this for 9 long years, naturally this makes us (in the immortal words of that great thinker raven) “a dog-fucking piece of shit of the lowest possible denominator” with (as that profound commentator General Stuck intoned with his usual wisdom) “a massive case of butt rabies.”

Comments are closed.

Get Involved!

It takes just 5 minutes, twice a week:

Make a call
Send an email
Send a postcard or fax
Make your voice heard!

For both local and national numbers, recommended scripts and approaches: